Hi,
I came across this when looking for why wordpad was axed from Win11. Will this have an impact on Rhino in the future.
“VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before being retired in future Windows releases. Initially, the VBScript feature on demand will be preinstalled to allow for uninterrupted use while you prepare for the retirement of VBScript.”
Here’s the link I read this from… Resources for deprecated features in the Windows client | Microsoft Learn
Will this effect older vbscripts or the vbscript editor in Rhino as we move forward?
RM
Yes; eventually we’ll need to deal with this and that specific time is unknown. Large deprecations like this can take quite a few years. It seems like there will be a point in time in the future when Windows will not support VBScript which is what RhinoScript is built on.
Part of me is hoping AI gets good enough by that point to just rewrite rvb scripts to python for you. I’m not going to depend on that though and research other options.
Hi Steve,
I’m coming to the realization I need to learn python to some extant if only to transfer my macros over. Wondering what you’ll come up with maybe it’s time for a true Rhino programming language a simple one not based on other’s development like MS or python or so deeply complex like GH.
RM
We developed the rhinoscriptsyntax module in python for the sole purpose of trying to make this transition easier. It’s still not a walk in the park, but you will have a familiar set of functions.
We actually find that supporting popular languages gives us a much longer runway. It has been 23 years for our VBScript support. Bit hard to predict out how far these languages will go.
We hope that Python popularity and not only support from a single company may allow it to go for a long time. But of course it is all a guess. We also liked Python as there are a lot of current library development for it in research and technology.
Thanks I understand.
I had to laugh as not one person on that link wanted VBscript to be deprecated.
Is the deprecation the reason why you never answered my post on the cut and paste into Vbscript editor from the help file bug? See my post that never got answered.
You might be surprised at how much AI can help you with this. Since Python that uses Rhinoscriptsyntax is so well documented the AI takes you quite far. Python is also quite easy to learn. It’s possible to pick it up on the fly using AI.
Rhinocommon on the other hand is not well documented and the AI constantly fumbles it. Sometimes you have to explicitly tell the AI to only use Rhinoscript.
When I read this post I was worried that this would also mean Rhinoscriptsyntax for Python would stop working but I see that it’s actually decoupled. It seems to jive really good with Python, at least for me.